1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an image processing apparatus of an OCR (optical character recognizing) apparatus, a copying machine, a facsimile, or the like and, more particularly, to image processing method and apparatus and memory medium which can properly extract characters from an input image including a table image.
The invention also relates to image processing method and apparatus and memory medium which can discriminate a format of an input table and properly extract a character image when the character image is extracted from an input table image.
The invention also relates to image processing method and apparatus and memory medium which can automatically discriminate attributes of a table image included in an input image without manually designating the attributes by the user.
2. Related Background Art
An OCR apparatus having an automatic area dividing function performs processes to automatically discriminate an image surrounded by rules as a table image and extract a cell surrounded by the rules of a table as one character area.
After characters were recognized, by inserting a tab code between character trains of a result of the recognition obtained from one character area and inserting a return code between lines, information of the cell extracted from the table image is reflected to document data after completion of the recognition of characters, thereby enabling data to be easily supplied to table calculating software or the like.
According to the foregoing conventional technique, however, when the table image serving as a target of the character recognition is a table without lateral rule, as shown in FIG. 7, since a plurality of items arranged in the vertical direction are discriminated as one character area, a document of a form different from that of the input table is obtained and the operation to correct the form to that of the input table is forced on the operator, so that a burden on the operator is increased.